S. Awan is an independent journalist, culture lover and student of history, navigating the depths of various aspects of culture, politics, music, film, the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

In the sixth Star Trek film, The Undiscovered Country, Ambassador Spock tells Captain Kirk, “There’s an old Vulcan saying – only Nixon could go to China.”

The line was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, suggesting that Nixon going to China was so symbolically significant that it had even become a saying among an alien race centuries in the future.

The Nixon-going-to-China reference has also been cited a bunch of times in recent days, since it has been announced that Donald Trump appears to have accepted North Korea’s invitation for the US President to attend a talk with Kim Jong-un. The seemingly sudden onset of diplomacy and de-escalation seems to have caught most commentators off-guard.

I noticed something curious recently, nestled away in one of the newspapers: that the Chinese government has apparently banned the classic book 1984 by George Orwell.

There’s something that kind of speaks for itself when an oppressive government bans not just any old book, but something as specific as 1984. Orwell’s Animal Farm has also been banned, for that matter.

But it seems fairly obvious that a state that functions entirely along 1984 lines would eventually need to make sure its citizens don’t get to read 1984 and notice the similarities.

This is apparently part of a massive online censorship campaign. Clearly, either Orwell’s books have been getting too much attention in China or the authorities want to make sure they don’t get any attention – or both. Makes sense, of course – if you’ve built 1984 in real terms, you have to make sure your citizens don’t realise it or at least don’t have such a glaring frame of reference. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that was bloody insane – all of it.

But then we appear to be living in an insane asylum in which the inmates have taken control.

If you ever needed a more perverse and overt expression of the incestousness nature of the Trump/Netanyahu relationship – and indeed of the Zionist/End-Timers fanaticism that I keep talking about here – it was in the last couple of days, which saw the official ceremony for the new US embassy in Jerusalem, accompanied by the deaths of dozens of Palestinian protesters.

I don’t want to keep re-writing the same points over again, so I’ve re-posted below (in full) the older article on Jerusalem, the embassy move, and more importantly the Judeao-Christian Zionist plan to seize the Temple Mount and pave the way for the ‘rapture’, the Second Coming and the Biblical Apocalypse.Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a short one; and is really just an anecdote and not anything important.

But the most random, odd thing happened to me a couple of weeks back. It was on the day my grandfather passed away – in fact, it was just a few minutes before my grandfather passed away and it took place in the hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

It has of course been clear for a long time that the Trump presidency is very much in bed with the Netanyahu government in Israel.

If it hadn’t already been obvious, the Jerusalem declaration very much confirmed it. Like the Jerusalem declaration, Trump’s abandonment of the JCPOA has also been largely condemned by traditional American allies, with the EU and even Britain expressing their lack of solidarity with Washington’s actions.

As I noted very early in Trump’s presidency, it was obvious that one of the reasons Barack Obama and John Kerry scrambled to support EU-proposed sanctions on Israel (for illegal Zionist settlement-building) as one of their final acts was because they knew the incoming Trump administration was entirely a Likud/Zionist ally that would abandon all pretense of responsible, even-handed international relations. Read the rest of this entry »

Am I the only one who can’t quite work out what happened last weekend in Syria or what it’s all supposed to mean?

That is, I can’t work out what the US-UK-France Triumvirate (the same Triumvirate that led the intervention against Gaddafi in Libya) was trying to do when it decided to carry out strikes against alleged chemical weapons locations in Syria.

It’s all been a bit confused. Which is one reason I haven’t commented on any of it until now. The other reason is that the night of the military action (Friday 13th) was the day I was burying my grandfather: and so I had no interest in writing anything or keeping track of events at that time.

But it also allowed me to delay or withhold opinion and just keep an unbiased eye on the news for a few days to see how things unfolded.

The mess that’s been created in Syria is extraordinary.

Syria is also definitively where international law died. Arguably, Iraq and Libya saw international law already collapsing: but Syria is where even all pretense of international law died. It is where borders, sovereignty and the right to self-determination got tossed out the window.

It is also where compassion, logic, reason, diplomacy, and truth, all seem to have died – along with journalism and along with probably the United Nations – their corpses rotting in the desert for all to see.

I want to explore here the subject of why international law is so important; why it is dead; and why I blame not just governments and military regimes, but journalists and the media. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a very serious problem with the resurgence of genuine anti-Semitism in different parts of the world, including in much of Europe.

The Internet is playing a massive part in that – and it’s not just the modern Neo-Nazi groups (of which there are now many) that are espousing a viciously anti-Semitic world view, nor just embittered Arabs, but lots of other people too.

Lots of this stuff is every bit as nasty as Nazi propaganda in the thirties and it goes way beyond any legitimate political issues and off into the realm of unbridled racial hatred of the most offensive kind. Jewish communities have every right to be extremely sensitive or defensive, given very real anti-Semitism and given the obvious historical contexts too. This upsurge in racism and propagandizing against Jews has to be taken seriously.

With the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, it freshly occured to me that the harrowing subject of My Lai actually also sheds some light on the reality of the decline in real journalism in the modern age.

I would assert that you can track the decline in the integrity and purpose of mainstream journalism by tracking the standing of a specific journalist named Seymour Hersh.

So, firstly, why is Hersh regarded as such an important journalist?

Well, it was a piece of investigative journalism by Hersh decades ago that exposed the war crime committed by US forces in My Lai in Vietnam. The My Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed Vietnamese civilians (somewhere between 347 and 504 people) by American troops in South Vietnam in 1968. Read the rest of this entry »

Human beings aren’t just getting greedier, but stupider.

That’s according to Professor Stephen Hawking: and, really, it doesn’t seem like a particularly shocking statement or commentary.

Just simple observation seems to indicate a rapid stupidification process going on all over the place, for a whole host of reasons and manifesting in a whole bunch of different ways.

You see it in society. You see it in people. You see in politicians and political discourse. You see it all across social media. You see in the entertainment industries. You see it in the White House. I’m not even entirely sure when it started to happen – but we appear to be fast-heading towards the comedy-Dystopian future envisioned in the cult movie Idiocracy. Read the rest of this entry »

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